A few weeks back I was considering what the topic would be for this month's blog post. For whatever reason, my inner knowing was being unusually quiet and distant. Professional writers label this experience as 'Writer's Block'. It's a point where our desire for something tangible is not in alignment with the desire of the Divine to provide for our needs, and we become temporarily unable to connect with the creative energies of Source.
As I sat and pondered and attempted to write a few posts that just didn't feel right, I had an instinctive urge to reach out to my friend, Kaley, and inquire from her what I could write about. I've known Kaley for about 5 years now, and she has been an instrumental part of my journey and is one of the few people I can honestly say understands and expresses unconditional love. (You can find her on Instagram here.)
Her response to me was simple, reminding me of a conversation we had some time back about the power of language and that "the use of labels and how we start referring to a word/teaching/pointer instead of truth itself" can create barriers in our ability to know and understand the Self. Since I've had a long history of consciously engaging with language - both in the inner confines of my mental body and also with the external world - I immediately knew this was the topic I wanted to share more about.
The ability to speak is by far the most powerful tool we as humans have been gifted, and one that we have had at our disposal for well over 12,000 years or more. Language didn't just give us the ability to communicate. There is a very long list of animals who have learned to do that. It also gave us access to self-awareness, which led to self-realization, which led to the expansion of consciousness, which we are seeing the unfolding of at a much faster rate than any other time in human history - at least, the history that we have documented and, as a species, remember.
"I use the word sensing because words matter. If we spend our life “looking” for things, we may miss out on all that we can hear, taste, touch, feel and otherwise perceive and intuitively sense. Vision is too narrow a definition for what makes up our human consciousness" - Katherine Ann Byam
My relationship with words began about twenty years ago, around the time that my spiritual growth began to flourish as well. I was studying spiritual meditation with a guru at the time, and also enrolled in a course on Neuro-Linguistic Programming. As my meditations took me into deeper states of awareness, I began to pay attention to my inner voice. Not in a way that validated what that voice was telling me, as at the time the language of my inner world was very deflating and negative in nature, but rather just being aware of it. Like my guru had taught early in our work together, it was important to question everything of my experience, both the inner and outer worlds. "Question everything," he would say, "so you can recognize the patterns of beliefs that aren't true."
One of the first patterns I identified and began to set aside was the concept that there were things I needed in order to feel complete. I needed a nice car, a good house, a well-paying job, to feel loved by my family, and so on. Yet, as I challenged this belief, I came to understand that these weren't things that I needed but were things that I wanted or desired. I began to change the way my inner voice spoke to me about these perceived 'needs', asking it to show me what life would be like if I didn't have these things.
I saw images that felt like failure: not earning enough to pay my bills; losing my house; my wife leaving and taking the kids; me ending up living in a squatter's camp under a bridge. As each image was presented, all with an underlying sense of fear attached, I sat with them until I was able to accept that, yes, this could be a possible outcome. Yet, even if these things came true, there was one thing that wouldn't change: I would still be 'me'.
“Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man” ― Martin Heidegger
None of these things that my mind was saying I could end up losing were things that I had as part of my life just ten years prior. If I had been able to survive without them before, certainly I would be able to survive without them again. They didn't define who I was. They were things that I had chosen to add into my life at some point in the past. Regardless of why I had chosen them, they were still the result of choices, not something I needed in order to exist, to be complete, or to feel like I was a part of this world. In fact, losing them, I realized, could be one of the best things that ever happened.
At that moment I decided that the word 'need' would no longer be a part of my language. Even those things that my physical body needed to stay alive, like food, water and air, would no longer be seen as things I needed, but things I would choose to accept. After all, since I know my existence will continue in some form after my spirit leaves this body, then being alive is a choice, not a need.
Everything from that moment became a game of 'this or that'. I no longer allowed my inner voice to speak to me in terms of things it said I needed. When it did try to make me feel like I was missing out on something or that there was something I had to have in order to be complete, I would follow that feeling back to its source. The source was almost always the same: a much younger version of myself that had felt hurt, hadn't had its needs met, or had accepted a belief that wasn't true. Giving that part of my identity the attention that it was still seeking allowed me to operate from a place of power rather than feeling powerless. The more I did this, the quieter my inner voice became, until one day I realized I hadn't heard from it for a long time. We had established a new relationship, one that feels so much gentler than before.
Don't get me wrong, there are still times when that voice speaks loudly and tries to drag me into the drama that it wants to create. There are times when my emotional body is filled with anxiety or fear or stress or worry and concern. These things are part of the human condition. How we approach them is what matters most. Whether you see your inner voice as being associated with the ego, the smaller 'self', or by some other name, I don't believe we are meant to separate from or defeat this part. It has a function to perform. Just as our lungs are meant to breathe and our hearts are meant to beat, our minds are meant to think. Accepting this in a way that honors this part, and yet leaves room for the expansion of a new way of being opens the path to enlightenment and inner peace.
All it takes is to change the words we use, discarding words that feel heavy or unsupportive and choosing language that feels more aligned with the direction we are choosing to follow.